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is a point of little or no importance for our present purpose. But, supposing the three tribes to have spoken, as they probably did, different dialects, it becomes very im

stantine. In a subsequent passage (27) Nennius speaks of the Roman generals (duces Romanorum) having been on three several occasions (tribus vicibus) put to death by the Britons. Yet, after all this, it is

added, the latter sought the help of the Romans against the Picts and Scots, and, having sworn submission, had an army sent to them. Gildas (12, 14), and Beda, who follows and amplifies his account (Hist. 1. 12, 13), make three successive embassies to have been sent to Rome, the first and second of which were each successful in obtaining such assistance as sufficed to repel the barbarians for the time; but the third, addressed to the Consul Aetius, proved ineffectual. From what Beda says here, and with more precision in his tract De Sex Aetatibus Sæculi, the first and second of these embassies would appear to have been despatched between A.D. 414 and 419, the third in 446. The force, therefore, which was accorded in compliance with the second embassy, and which would, according to this version of the story, be the last Roman force that visited the island, may very well have left in the year 418, as asserted in the National Chronicle, and by Ethelwerd. (See ante, p. 8.) Beda states the first arrival of the Saxons to have taken place in the first year of the reign of the Emperor Marcian, which was A.D. 450, although he seems to have taken it for 449. There is no dispute about the date of the third embassy, in 446; but Mr Hardy supposes the first to have been despatched probably in 396, and the second in 435, assigning the arrival of the Saxons, as stated in the text, to the year 428 in the intervening space. This is also the date that is adopted by Camden, who is followed, among others, by D'Anville, Etats Formés en Europe, pp. 199, 200. But see the objections stated by Gibson (in part after Stillingfleet and Usher), Britannia, translation of, (1722), pp. clx. and clxi.

Consult upon the history of Roman Britain Lappenberg's England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, translated by Thorpe (2 vols. 8vo, Lond. 1845), I. 6—73; the Hon. Algernon Herbert's Britannia after the Romans, 2 vols. 4to, Lond. 1836 and 1841, and his Annotations to the edition of the Irish Translation of Nennius, printed by the Irish Archæological Society, 4to, Dub. 1848; the Rev. J. C. Bruce's Roman Wall, 8vo, Lond. 1851; and Mr Guest's paper in the 1851 volume of the Memoirs of the Archæological Institute, already referred to. And

portant, in tracing the origin and history of the common language which grew up among them, to understand in what parts of their new country they severally settled. The accepted account of this matter derived from Beda and other sources, is, that the Jutes occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, with part of the opposite coast of Hampshire; that the Saxons established themselves in all the rest of the country to the south of the Thames and of the Bristol Avon, and also in Essex and Middlesex, and the southern part of Hertford; and that the Angles took possession of all the rest of England, which also received. its name (originally Aengla-land, or Engla-land) from them, their dominion extending, apparently, as far north as to the Forth and the Clyde. The various bodies of the old Celtic population, however, maintained their independence in the kingdoms or principalities of Strath-Clyde (or Reged, that is, the Kingdom), Cumbria (or Cumberland), North and South Wales (Cambria), and Cornwall, along the whole line of the western coast.

There is little doubt that among the invaders there must also have been a considerable proportion of Frisians, either from the Greater Friesland (Frisia Major), formerly extending from the Scheld to the Weser, or from the Lesser Friesland (Frisia Minor), lying on the western coast of Sleswig, opposite to the Isle of North-Strand, whence these northern Frieslanders were called Strandfrisii. Beda himself, in another place (Hist. Eccles. v. 9), enumerates the Fresones among the nations from whom the Angles or Saxons inhabiting Britain are known to have derived their origin. Sir Francis Palgrave goes the length of saying (Hist. Anglo-Sax. 33, 34), that "the

upon the general subject of the Romans in Britain, see an interesting article in the Edinburgh Review, No. 191 (for July 1851), pp. 177– 204.

tribes by whom Britain was invaded appear principally to have proceeded from the country now called Friesland; for, of all the continental dialects, the ancient Frisick is the one which approaches most nearly to the Anglo-Saxon of our ancestors."-(See also his "Rise and Progress of the Eng. Commonwealth," 41, 42.)

The whole account preserved by Beda of the invasion. of Britain by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes has been treated as of scarcely any historical value by Mr Kemble in his work entitled "The Saxons in England," 2 vols. 8vo, 1849 (see vol. 1. pp. 1-34). But, whatever force may be allowed to the reasoning by which Mr Kemble would establish, on the one hand, the mixture of poetical or fabulous elements in the narrative, and, on the other, its unauthorised character for the greater part, it seems very unlikely that it can be wholly without foundation in so far as respects the only portion of it with which we are here concerned, namely, that comprising the descent of the invaders from a diversity of tribes, the locations of the different tribes in the conquered country, and also the districts on the Continent whence they had severally Some distinction between the Saxons and Angles, indeed, is sufficiently attested by the existence of those two general appellations, to say nothing of those of such particular states or districts as Essex, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, &c. In discriminating the Saxon and Anglian populations, Beda was dealing with facts lying under his eye, and as to which he could hardly be mistaken, more especially if, as is nearly certain, the original difference of descent was still marked by a dialectic difference of speech. And, perhaps, this may not have been the only difference that divided, and always had divided, the Anglian and Saxon states. Nor would

come.

two distinct and possibly rival populations, set down beside one another in a new country, readily lose the memory of their original seats. Indeed, it hardly can be seriously made matter of dispute that the Angles and Saxons of Britain were offshoots from the Angli and Saxones of the Continent :-the Angli, who are first mentioned by Tacitus in the first century; the Saxones, who are first mentioned (at least under that name) in the second century by Ptolemy.

With regard to the Jutes, however, the case is not so clear. In the third edition of his work on the English Language (London, 1851), Dr Latham (pp. 10-12) has endeavoured to show that, although Jutland in Denmark undoubtedly took its name from a people called the Jutes, the derivation of any part of the invaders of Britain, after the fall of the Roman Empire, from that people, is a mistake arising from Beda (whose name for them, as we have seen, appears to be, not Juti, but Vitæ), or, it may some preceding writer whom he copied, having confounded the Celtic element Wiht in Wiht-saetan (the Wight-people, or inhabitants of the Isle of Wight) with the similar element in Vit-land, or With-land, which are other forms of the name of the peninsula commonly called Jutland.

be,

It has been usual, also, with modern writers to assume that the continental region from which the distinctively Saxon portion of the invaders of Britain was derived was not confined to Beda's Old Saxony, or the district now called Holstein, but probably extended as far westward along the coast of the North Sea as to the Weser, or even to the Rhine.

V. The Fourth fact is, that in the latter part of the ninth century extensive settlements were effected in the North-eastern parts of England by a Scandinavian people, the Northmen or Danes.

WHATEVER may be the origin or etymological meaning of the term Danes, it had come by the eighth century to be the common name for those bands of piratical rovers, from the countries around the Baltic, who were otherwise called Northmen or Normans. They are held to have been drawn from every part of the extensive region which the ancients designated Scandinavia; but it is remarkable that, whereas that appellation is understood in its strictest sense to include only the modern Sweden and Norway, it is to Denmark that the Danes have left their name. The geographical position of Denmark, divided from the proper Scandinavian countries by so considerable an extent of sea, will hardly allow us to interpret the name as signifying the Border land of the Danes, taking mark here in the same sense which it has in the names of the Anglian kingdom of Mercia (bordering on Wales), ́the old French country of La Marche (bordering on Limousin), and the Mark of the Germans, and the Marca of the Italians, in various instances. In other cases, however, mark must be understood as meaning merely a district or territory marked off, or simply what we commonly call a land or country.

It is further worth noticing that the modern kingdom of Denmark comprehends all the districts from which issued, according to the old accounts, the several tribes

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